How to Make a Banner

Add overlays or images to your banner to give it a stylish background.

Add a message to your banner with text.

Designing a social media banner is hard, right? You’re supposed to find a designer, spend a bunch of money, and work with whatcha got, right?

Forget all that.

We’ll show you how to make the perfect banner for anything you need. Between our tools, templates, expert designer tips, and that brain of yours, you’ll never have to wonder how to make a social media banner, a banner ad, or how to make a banner for your online store.

After you’ve opened your canvas, pick your Canvas Color (in the Basic Edits tab). The color picker lets you choose from the spectrum or input a specific hex code for those of you with specific color schemes. This is especially great for making a banner for your Etsy store, where having coordinated colors is a great way to stand out and attract more visitors.

Design tip: Be aware of common color associations and try to do something unexpected. Weddings are often showcased with pastels, eco-friendly topics are green, etc. These associations are visual cue as to what you’re about, but they won’t necessarily help you stand out. To pop, try using different tones.

Or start in collage with photos or swatches

Banners with photos are great for businesses since they can showcase your merchandise and give customers a taste of your brand. It’s easy to size a collage in PicMonkey and arrange the pictures to your liking. Set the pixel dimensions in the bottom toolbar, or select a pre-sized collage under the layouts tab. Just drag your photos into the cells to add them to a collage. Create your own cells by dragging your pics over the collage and dropping them when a thin blue line appears.

Variegated swatches offer even more options for beautiful graphic backgrounds. Swatches are perfect for everything from seasonal specials to simple zig-zags and stripes. Alls you gotta do is plug in your dimensions into a one-celled collage, pick a swatch (from the Swatches tab), and take it back to the Editor with the Send to Editor button in the top toolbar. To learn how to use images and swatches in Collage, check out our article, How to Make a Photo Collage.

Design Tip: Less is usually more. This Etsy banner is just one swatch, one overlay, and one typeface. Boom.

Or start with a design template

Pssst… Click to start editing me right now!

We’ve made this so easy for ya. We have a nice selection of designer-crafted templates to choose from; just search type Banner into the search bar to find our perfectly-sized selection. Feel free to stick to our main look, or use your newfound design savvy to change up text, overlays, colors and more. Our templates are fully editable, so the sky’s the limit.

If you’re specifically looking to make a Facebook cover, search for the Facebook cover tag in our Templates picker. Find one that tickles your fancy and plop it into our editor to get personalizing.

Create custom design elements with Overlays

It’s hard to talk about making a graphic banner without mentioning Overlays. Overlays are our vector graphics, which means that they’ll look crisp and pretty, no matter how big or small you make ‘em.

Here’s a good example of both. The teddy-eared monster overlay becomes an iconic logo while the rest of the Critters overlays make up a cohesive background that reinforces the identity of the brand, business, or person. Between the Overlays and Themes tabs, PicMonkey has over 1,100 overlays. But g’head and take that number up to infinity, because you can upload any of your own.

You can adjust their size, color, aspect ratio, and even erase parts out to get a completely custom look.

Message in Style with Text

Design tip:Pairing different fonts makes your banner dynamic, but using too many can be distracting, cause confusion, and result in a lack of clarity. Choose two (never more than three) fonts and stick with them. For example, pick a bold sans serif font for your headings and a lite, easy to read serif font for secondary headings and body text. Using additional typefaces from within your chosen font set (such as thins, lites, bolds, italics, etc), as well as different font sizes and colors can give you a lot of variety.

Texty tricks

In this Gotham Comix ad, each line of text is part of a separate text block. This way, you have full control over each line’s alignment and sizing. There’s all kinds of cool stuff you can do with text. For instance, if legibility is a problem, try adding the drop shadow effect.If you want the text itself to be the main attraction, text masking could be just what you’re looking for. Check out our video on mastering text effects to learn more.

Tip: If you’ve added an overlay or text object and rotated it, you can straighten it by right-clicking on the object and choosing Straighten.

PicMonkey

This article was written by PicMonkey Staff, a multicellular organism of hive-minded sub-parts who just wanna get you the ideas and information you crave, so you can make good pictures and take over the world.